February « 2007 « Luis Villa

February, 2007

creating an academic research agenda

[Cross-posted from First Movers; comments off here and on over there.]

I just attended a small forum on the creation of a research agenda. I’ll skip naming the profs involved because I’m sure my notes will be atrociously misrepresentative of what they actually meant and said, but I thought it would be worth sharing my notes on their talk, and asking for contributions and tips from others who are starting or have started down the road towards academia.

So without further ado, their anonymized thoughts:

One prof distinguished between Research Agenda- the 2-4 page document you present during a job search- and the research agenda- your bigger vision. I’ll keep the capitalization distinction in these notes, for lack of a better term.
Noted that you must be passionate about your research agenda, so figuring it out can involve answering the question: what is your interest/vision? What is on your mind all the time? what questions can’t you find answers to? what confuses you (once you’re certain that no one else can clarify the confusion)?
keep a diary/location where you put ideas/files/cases/etc. that tie together- write in it when you have the idea, not later, even if you only write briefly. This will help you understand your vision to create the research agenda, and give you a resource when you want to write the Research Agenda. One prof noted that keeping it all on your computer means you can use Google Desktop to search through it; [Ed.: I think I'll be experimenting with doing this in a wiki; I've been capturing it already. Zotero also looks interesting for this.]
look for themes in your interests and studies- both in law school and outside, either in your personal interests or in your past work, like your undergraduate degree or research you did in between. These themes are likely to prove interesting and fruitful.
the profs note that it is useful to read works in progress, to keep up-to-date, to see what works in progress look like, and occasionally to build connections by writing useful corrections.
hiring committees are going to project you forward ten years and ask ‘is this person going to have made a difference?’ Making a difference is hard to do if you’re scattered; even harder to convince the hiring committee of that. So your agenda has to have coherence, in methodology, in topics, and/or in broader area. Noted in questions that you can avoid one of these- like, have a consistent methodology that you apply over multiple domains- but you might still be disadvantaged by not having ties to a specific topic.
suggestion that you think about three as the right number of projected papers in your Research Agenda- more and you’re a braggart, and they likely won’t happen anyway.
Early on, don’t get too specific; don’t get too broad- you’re not going to revolutionize legal scholarship in your first article. Your ambition is to coin buzzwords that stand for actual original ideas that become branded to you. (Other professor said she ‘wasn’t that cynical yet’ and that if one wants to coin buzzwords, one should avoid going overboard.)
Seminar papers are a good starting point for your first paper- you’ve already written it; it is a good chunk of the length; it has been already vetted and argued over once.

I have no idea if I want to go into academia, but I do want to read and write in a directed way over the next two years. So I thought lots of this was useful, and I’d love to hear if others have tips and suggestions along these lines.
[Picture is a law library in the early spring; available under the CC-SA license.]

misc. — 1 Comment
12
Feb 07

another dream job I’m just a little too late for ;)

One of the things that makes me think I did the right thing going to law school is that every so often incredible jobs in very cool law offices open up. I’ve snagged an internship in one of those places, of course, but there are others. The latest such dream opening is at Creative Commons, where their general counsel, Mia Garlick, is apparently moving on to greener fields. (No idea what those are or could be… :) From the one conversation we’ve had (right before this picture was taken) and some lurking of mine on the cc-license mailing list, Mia seems like a very sharp cookie- I wish her luck wherever she goes next. I hear that there were over 100 applications for EFF’s last legal opening, and I’m sure this one will be similarly contested. Good luck to whoever gets it next…

[update: Lessig says Mia has been swallowed by Google.]

misc. / school — No Comments
12
Feb 07

quote of the day

“I’m sure Vanna White is tangible.”

– classmate, talking about whether or not Vanna White is copyrightable.

maemo — 10 Comments
9
Feb 07

n800 notes

Less than 24 hours after I blogged that I was glad I wasn’t getting an N800, I got the code for an N800. And of course I bought it, because I’m a sucker for toys, even ones that I predicted would become paperweights. ;)

I used it extensively for the first time today. Some thoughts:

great battery life. Used it as an mp3 player, tromped around downtown new york for almost three hours, played some tetris while waiting for lunch… still reporting 5 hours of use time left when I got home.
mp3 player. Why no ogg by default? can’t be more than a handful of Kb of extra binary, no?
opera has improved; google maps mostly works now, ditto calendar. Still would prefer a working minimo (which was crashy and slow but handled google calendar on my 770.)
still miss my palm’s text entry; nothing has changed in that respect since my first impressions of the 770.
application installation has gotten much better than it was on the 770. Still needs some love, though- some application installs from the otherwise nifty applications repository fail mysteriously, which is irritating to me and probably hugely frustrating to a normal user.
was very, very disappointed to find out that canola is closed source. That dampens my excitement for it considerably.
when I import an opml file to the rss reader, it makes me manually check every feed that I want to import. Not going to bother with that with my feed list- too long. Should default to assuming that I want to import them all.
tigert’s theme is so much better than the overly dark default theme that it isn’t even funny. Really look forward to the tango port.
video is cool, though I was unable to use it reliably with tigert- bad connection. (generally I seem to lose connection to google talk very often, even though otherwise my wireless connection seems reliable. No idea what the problem is there.)
I really, really want the novell slab menu on the N800. Giant, deep hierarchical menus are bad enough on a full-size screen; on the N800 they are terrible. SLAB NOW! :)
the widgets metaphor on the micro-desktop is broken. I wrote a long email about this to tigert that I’ll spare everyone else, but suffice to say that having a ‘desktop’ on a device that small is a confusing waste of pixels.

Overall, I am guessing that this will end up not getting used too much- I already carry my laptop just about everywhere, so this won’t buy me much. But I think as of today I’ve already used it more than my 770- so who knows, maybe it’ll keep growing on me :)

personal / software — 4 Comments
9
Feb 07

two tools for getting my head back above water

I’ve been swamped this month with a couple very long, very intense, very un-fun writing projects. I’m very happy to finally be at a good point with the writing, to be semi-caught up in classes (at least, I’m now attending them and preparing beforehand), and have (finally) no critical unread/unresponded to email. (If you think your email to me was critical, and I haven’t responded, resend it.)

Two tools have helped me out a lot with this in the past couple weeks: Kiwi Cloak (a greasemonkey script which screams at you about over-browsing) and Page Addict (which tracks your overall web usage, so that you can more easily see how much time you’re spending and/or wasting.) I can’t recommend them too much to anyone who thinks that they are maybe spending too much time online- they’ve really helped me focus, refine, and cut down on my web use over the past two weeks. Still too much, probably, but for the first time in a long time I’m headed in the right direction there.

[This means I'm now using firefox and not epiphany. It saddens me on a lot of levels, so I'll try to write more about that soon, but in a nutshell: platform, platform, platform. I'm willing to have an inferior user experience in the core browsing functionality in order to have other functionality via a thriving plugin infrastructure.]

misc. — No Comments
8
Feb 07

mail to tieguy.org potentially bouncing- resend critical mail to luis.villa@gmail.com

I’ve now had two reports from people in the past 48 hours of mail to tieguy.org bouncing. Judging from the spam, tieguy.org’s mail service is functional, to the tune of 7-800 spam a day, plus lots of non-spam. But if for some reason you have sent me a mail that I’ve not responded to, and it is critical, do resend it to luis.villa@gmail.com.

Am going to spend some time in the next few days trying to make tieguy.org’s mail service more reliable, and/or better monitored.

forfacebook / law / software — 17 Comments
3
Feb 07

lust

After working on a brief until very late last night, my brain was burnt from reading long documents on a small, horizontally oriented screen, and flipping back and forth between what I was reading and what I was writing.

It marks me as a serious geek that the obvious solution is to get one of these:

Question for the Linux video geeks out there (yes, probably this means you, Keith ;): are there video cards with Free drivers that will drive something like this? It isn’t anything fancy, just dual VGA or DVI outputs. I could care less about 3D fanciness; this is about displaying gobs and gobs of text.

(Not that money will miraculously fall from the sky to pay for this particular monitor or anything, but there are cheaper variations on the theme, and since I will be living reasonably cheaply in North Carolina over the summer maybe I’ll be able to take a look at this in the fall.)

5tagsOSS / misc. / software — 35 Comments
1
Feb 07

open source thought leaders (aka ‘if you were stranded on a desert island, and could only have 5 rss feeds…)

Lauren Cooney, one of IBM’s open source folks, asks who the top five open source thought leaders are. Interesting question- here is my answer. Of course, I can’t limit it to just five. Oops. :)

Not all of these folks are bloggers; many choose more traditional routes to express their ideas, which is great/fine, just means you’ll have to put in more work to get their ideas. :) Feel free to tack on your own suggestions in comments- I’m out of the loop, so I’m sure I’ve missed people.

Note that my focus here is mostly not on who the top thinkers are, but rather the top thought leaders- i.e., influence counts for more than correctness. Thankfully, we’re mostly a sane bunch and so the people who get listened to are usually right :)

five who don’t say much, but who are listened to raptly when they do say things:

linus, mitchell baker, bdale garbee: lead the most successful open source projects, have a big impact in corporations, demonstrate good judgment and good taste, and voila- you’re huge. All spend more time doing than talking. (Also in this category, though probably a step below in terms of broad impact: Larry Wall, Nat/Miguel, Brian Behlendorf.)
eben moglen and richard stallman: love them or hate them, when they weigh in on a debate it usually has a huge impact.

six who say a lot and are listened to very broadly. Hard list to write, since ‘open source’ is so broad and fragmented- I tried to exclude folks whose impact is felt only in one community.

tim o’reilly: duh. :)
simon phipps and tim bray: big thinkers at an industry heavyweight. Don’t always agree with Simon (particularly think he tends to ignore Sun’s miscues while vigorously attacking the same mistakes when made by others) but he’s a very sharp thinker on open source issues most haven’t even thought about yet (governance, dealing with patents instead of wishing them away), and always worth listening to.
mark pilgrim: a blog I read said yesterday ‘if you are arguing with Mark Pilgrim, you are probably wrong.’ Sadly does not blog as much as he used to. (dhh may be the new Mark, though I disagree with dhh more often than I disagree with Mark.)
matt asay: he’s got his finger deeply on the pulse of what is going on in the open source business space, and is widely listened to there.
mark shuttleworth: only CEO of an open source company on my list- speaks often about open source and has a very big platform to say it from. Szulik or Tiemann could easily join mark here, but both seem to favor talking softly and carrying a big stick so I think of them as less ‘thought leaders’ and more ‘leaders by example.’

five conscious thinkers who should be listened to more:

redmonk, particularly stephen o’grady- smart people who are living and breathing transparent production principles, and as a result are quite influential and should be getting more so. (stephen gets called out because he is their open source guy; they are all sharp.)
karim lakhani: best academic thinker on the organizational mechanics of open source/peer production, bar none.
ethan zuckerman: lots of great thinking on how software (including open source) affects the non-first world.
tech liberation front: politics are in software and in software to stay, so politics is important. Whether or not you agree with their politics (very libertarian, just like many programmers) these are (IMHO) the sharpest collection of thinkers out there on the subject.
stormy peters: I always find stormy’s thinking on the industry to be very clear and very sharp. She should be higher-profile than she is.

four who are not strictly open source software people, but are software people and widely read and respected in the open source community:

joel spolsky: I think he comes across as a prick, but he’s a very, very smart prick, and even when I disagree with him (which is often) I learn something.
jon udell: now an MS employee; long a wise observer of industry trends. Likes to get his hands dirty in new tech trends.
kathy sierra: if you care about your users, no matter what field you are in, YOU MUST READ KATHY RELIGIOUSLY. YOU ARE FAILING TO DO YOUR JOB IF YOU DO NOT. Ahem. Possibly the only person (other than Lessig and Moglen) who I’d go out of my way to see speak at a conference.
paul graham: hacker, vc, great writer.

four who aren’t strictly software people, but are listened to anyway:

jimbo wales: the software/content lines are blurring, and jimbo is out there on the front lines of peer produced content.
lawrence lessig and yochai benkler: lawyers, and great, influential thinkers. If you are serious about thinking about open source, you’ve read Code; if you are very serious, you’ve started Wealth of Networks; if you are very, very serious, you’ve finished Wealth of Networks. :) (I’ve started.)
bruce schneier: rigorous thinking and great writing on a topic which should be near and dear to every programmer’s heart (security) means that when he speaks on software, he is listened to almost reverently. Fondness for transparency a big plus in the open source community.

six open source/tech law sources (most people won’t care about this list, but hey… this is my list :)

aforementioned: moglen, lessig, benkler
mark webbink, mike dillon: GCs at serious open source powers. Between the two of them may well determine the long-term fate of GPL v3, because their respective engineers write so much code.
wendy seltzer: Promotes MythTV. While teaching at law school. What more could you want. :)
legal staff at EFF: sadly, none of their lawyers blogs (that I know of) but collectively are on the front lines of, and set the agenda for, tech law development. [Ed.: a commenter points out that Jason Schultz blogs. Awesome.]
pam jones, groklaw: more open source developers get their legal news and opinions from pam than any other source, so she is influential no matter what you think of her.
andy updegrove: andy is The Man for open standards, which means he is The Man in the next big thing for open source.

six who would hate to be called thought leaders but are damn smart and doing very interesting things and should be famous:

chris blizzard: OLPC might be the most influential thing open source ever does; Chris is square in the middle of that.
havoc pennington: ran away from the well-earned spotlight to work on mugshot, which if successful could put tens of millions in regular touch with open source and put the spotlight back on him whether he likes it or not.
jeff and pia waugh: wish they lived in this hemisphere so I could see them in person more often.
aaron swartz: very smart. Now apparently fairly wealthy. Renaissance man. Younger than you.
david weinberger: co-author of the cluetrain manifesto; thinker on the internet and interwingliness; claims not to know a thing about software and hence might know more about software than the rest of this list put together.

[FWIW, Lauren's list was sort of java-centric, so I've never heard of many of the people on her list; I think several of them I have heard of would not consider themselves 'open source' people. But I'm sure they are interesting. My one serious quibble with her list is Marc Fleury- I don't know anyone who likes or respects Marc Fleury. Hard to be a thought leader when huge sections of the industry have flipped the bozo bit on you. Despite that quibble, I'm very glad Lauren did it and made me write all this down!]

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.